Focusing on the last quarter of the sixteenth and the first quarter
of the seventeenth centuries, this book examines both the making of
English identity in the New World and the effects of colonial experience
on the English imagination. Drawing on a wide range of primary materials
from plays, poetry, epics, historical and colonial documents, letters,
contemporary essays, advertising literature, street pamphlets, etc.,
Pong Linton investigates the mixing of romance and imperial vision as
they affect English voyagers and colonists on the one hand and English
writers and thinkers on the other. Noting in her introduction that during
the period romance plots moved away from the fruitless dalliance of
courtly lovers toward a new emphasis on marriage, she finds English
colonialism progressing from the image of questing knights to that of
merchants and established husbandmen. She connects this progression
to political and cultural differences between the Jacobean and Elizabethan
periods. Marriage as the fulfillment of this evolving romance plot thus
serves in the New World to justify English cultivation of virgin land,
education of the natives, and the English colonial plantation.

The romance opposition of court and adventure found in Gascoigne's
Green Knight and Spenser's Faerie Queene can also be seen
in the story of the English adventurers Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher, and
Grenville, all commoners elevated to knighthood by Elizabeth for fulfilling
their New World quests. These early English voyagers were understood
in the period (by the English if not the Spanish) as figures of classic
romantic adventure, Jasons seeking the golden fleece in the New World.
Pong Linton argues that "The special relationship between the queen
and her knighted pirates formed part of the chivalric fiction already
present in Elizabethan politics" (45). These exploring knights developed
a vocabulary of wonder, where magical illusion became miraculous vision
as they described the New World, often in terms of a potential erotic
bride. In contrast, Elizabeth became the image of the Protestant virgin
of reform protecting the empire against the Pope and Spain. Pong Linton
points out, however, that even during the period questions were raised
about this emerging colonial discourse. If the translation of Bartolome
de Las Casas into English in 1583 cast aspersions on Spanish and catholic
colonialism, Thomas Lodge's A Margarite of America (1596) likewise
presented a critique of English Protestant religious rhetoric used to
justify English adventurism and plunder.

In her third chapter Pong Linton presents a fascinating exploration
of the influence of the incipient cloth industry on English gender relations
and expanding colonial activity. Cloth production as an emerging form
of capitalist production displaced female domestic workers who now become
cloth consumers, a point Pong Linton makes in part through her analysis
of Thomas Deloney's Jack of Newberry (1597) a sort of "Horatio
Alger" story of a weaving apprentice working his way up to successful
master. It is not surprising that seeking markets for cloth in the New
World was proposed by Hakluyt in A Discourse of Western Planting
(1584) since he, like Deloney, was supported by the Clothworkers of
London. If the clothing of European explorers was frequently thought
to lead New World natives to see the Europeans as "gods," the project
of "clothing the savages" simultaneously supported the biblical mission
of saving souls, drawing together a Christian and commercial frame of
reference.

In Jamestown colonization turned out to be more difficult than the
English had imagined and, as it turned out, the Indians saved the starving
colonists by sharing food. To reverse these relations of power, Pong
Linton argues that an ideology develops to identify Indians, like women,
as "lovers of trifles" easily convinced to trade their land and possessions
for the shine and glitter of trinkets and beads of the self-possessed
masculine merchant. Pong Linton believes that this "magical consumerism"
may have been exaggerated by the English colonists, who only poorly
understood how they themselves may have been manipulated for the indigenous
people's own purposes. Nonetheless, the myth of the allure of magical
trifles allows the colonist to project his desire and take the natives
into his symbolic order. Pong Linton argues that the changing of women
from producers to consumers was challenged in England, for instance
in Jane Anger Her Protection of Women.

Continuing to explore several interesting conjunctures between romance,
gender, and colonial ideology, in her fifth chapter Pong Linton reads
Spenser's story of the character Serena (from book VI of the Faerie
Queene) straying beyond the bounds of civilization where she is
captured, stripped, displayed and almost eaten by cannibals, to demonstrate
the contrast between a lustful male nation of savages and the moral
English knight, Calepine. Pong Linton also shows that tobacco, the first
successful export from the English colonies, became a kind of "Circean
drug," "something [that] imported and inhaled signifies an otherness
within that undoes the boundaries between civilized and savage."
(118) As tobacco-farming colonists became successful merchants they
were able to pay for the passage to Virginia of English women willing
to serve as domestic labourers and wives. Pong Linton's rich conception
of romance takes in captured damsels, civilization-undoing magic, and
mercantile exchange of women.

Pong Linton is fascinated by the way the English retell and reinscribe
classical stories to inform their own expanding empire. She presents
an extensive reading of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (1602),
connecting the romance's construction of inconsistency, of desertions
of women in foreign lands who have aided knights in their quests, to
colonists promoting Virginia, possessing her land, making quick profits,
and returning home. If Englishmen and Greeks both experience disputing
factions, if their projects are significantly more difficult than previously
imagined, there comes a moment of disillusion in the romance, a questioning
of whether potential gains are worth the cost. Pong Linton finds that
it is in this moment of the disillusion that, in the New World, the
romance narrative breaks down and the English resort to a fearful violence.

In her final chapter Pong Linton turns to that most analyzed of all
colonial literary narratives, Shakespeare's The Tempest, which
she describes as "a fantasy of origins, a preconstruction of colonial
politics narrated through the plot of a family romance" (156). Pong
Linton's focus on the ideology of the romance narrative helps us to
recognize Prospero within the evolving romance tradition, that of English
colonist and husbandman whose magic dazzles indigenous (and English)
perception. If Prospero fails in his efforts to educate Caliban in Christian
civility, Pong Linton finds an interesting parallel between Caliban's
attempted rape and the education he receives. While Miranda and Prospero
try to imprint their language and culture on Caliban, Caliban seeks
to imprint himself on her and "populate the islands with Calibans."
Moreover, as Caliban attempts to convince Stephano to destroy the magician's
books and take possession of a woman of unparalleled beauty, he frames
his rebellion in the language of romance, thus grasping the key to Prospero's
power. As a humanist conception of Christian education opposes witchcraft,
in the play New World Indian priests and English female witches come
together in the figure of Sycorax. Caliban as rapist threatens the romance
of Prospero's colonial husbandry, and the failure of Caliban's education
can be seen as a failure to erase a repressed legacy of female-gendered
memory.

From her discussion of The Tempest Pong Linton returns to the
Virginia Colony. She wonders about the civilizing process undergone
by Pocahontas (rechristened by the colonists "Rebecca") and her marriage
to John Rolfe, and she questions whether or not this process was as
successful as contemporary Englishmen believed. As with Prospero, the
Indians, of course, eventually turned against the English settlers,
some of whom had captured and tried to educate Indian children in Christianity.
As in The Tempest resistant natives were soon considered "rapists"
and the English settlers responded with an aggressive military policy.

Pong Linton cannot resist concluding her book with a few comments on
our contemporary representations of Pocahontas who has become "fully
ventriloquized by dominant colonial and cultural interests" and whose
image "sustains a mirage of intercultural and interracial harmony that
substitutes for a critical understanding of America's colonial history"
(186).

The strength of this work is in its central thesis, that
there are rich intertextual overlaps between English romance narratives
and English colonial texts and ideology. This is a thesis perhaps familiar
in the Spanish context, but in regard to English colonial narrative, it
is a significant addition. Throughout her study Pong Linton's analysis
is subtle, detailed, and convincing. Eschewing theoretical debate, she
respects the texts she works with and allows her argument to emerge from
them. I admit I am fascinated by her conjunction of political economy
and romance traditions. Her juxtaposition of literary works, such as The
Merchant of Venice or Troilus and Cressida, with New World
materials and paradigms is fascinating and complex. Extending the previous
scholarship of Stephen Greenblatt, Peter Hulme, and others, Pong Linton
details a gendered analysis of colonial discourse and demonstrates, more
effectively than her forebears, the interrelation of domestic and colonial
textuality.

Responses to this piece intended for the Readers'
Forum may be sent to the Editor at L.M.Hopkins@shu.ac.uk.